Shakespeare in the Shadow of Theology

Shakespeare wasn’t a theologian, but he was influenced by theology. This shouldn’t be altogether controversial. A friend of mine, a professor of English Literature specializing in Shakespeare, once said that Shakespeare’s Catholicism is “obvious” to the educated. But why is the obvious neglected, particularly by the so-called educated? Simply put, the concern for love (the essence of Christianity) has been replaced with the concern for power which strips love from the world and sees love as a veil that masks more insidious forces like racism, sexism, and power imbalances that pervade literary works.

In his new book, Will & Love: Shakespeare and the Motion of the Soul, Darren Dyck attempts to peel back the accretion of politicized interpretations of Shakespeare that have effectively killed the literary love for Shakespeare. “[L]iterature—upon which critics of literature discourse—is and has always been concerned, perhaps even primarily concerned, with love,” Dyck writes in reaction to David Schalkyk’s assertion that “[l]ove has all but vanished from the current critical discourse.” As I joked with a former classmate of mine from Yale a few weeks ago when chatting on Zoom, one of the reasons why I still love literature and discuss love in literature and drama is because I didn’t study third-rate political activism disguised as an English major.

Accepting the obvious in Shakespeare and the role of love in his dramas, Dyck begins to unpack the cultural, intellectual, and theological influences that shaped Shakespeare (both directly and indirectly). The tradition of “theological romance,” a product of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, to which the poetry of the Troubadours, Dante, Petrarch, and Chaucer all belong, have their roots in Augustine and Boethius. Boethius himself was an “Augustinian.” What does it mean to be Augustinian? Augustine articulated that love pervades and governs all things, even the human intellect. Love and its governing spirit on the will, not just the mere rational soul lost in intellectual contemplation, is what truly moves human life. While Augustine does not diminish rationality, he gives a greater place to love than what is found in Plato, Aristotle, and even earlier church fathers. It was Augustine, after all, who was intoxicated by love throughout the Confessions and who declared, most significantly in his homilies on the First Epistle of John, that “love itself is God” (in Latin: dilectio Deus est).

Augustine’s theology of love would subsequently take on many afterlives and revisions, first in Boethius and then the Renaissance poets: Dante, Petrarch, and Chaucer, before finding its way into the backdrop of Shakespeare. Theological romance, Dyck informs his readers, can be understood as being concerned with three ideas of love: “that love moves the lover; that love’s movement, somehow, does not diminish the lover’s agency; and that love is good. These ideas derive from the thought of Augustine.” What follows is a breathtaking tour-de-force bringing the reader up to par with the intellectual currents of theological romance and how this key opens up a beautiful and thought-provoking door into the soul of Shakespeare’s plays.

Dyck decides to concentrate on four of Shakespeare’s dramatic romances to highlight his thesis: Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, Twelfth Night, and Antony and Cleopatra. In having provided the contextual and intellectual background to theological romance, Dyck proceeds to carefully examine Shakespeare’s plays from the purview of Augustinian and Petrarchan realities, how love is the central governing spirit of the plays, how love acts upon the agency of the characters, how the characters freely act in the cosmos of love, and how the love the many characters exhibit is good even if, in many cases, they die by the play’s conclusion.

Despite tragedy accompanying much of Shakespearean romance, the idea that love is good and thereby sanctifying and redeeming—an insight from Augustine and revised through Boethius, Dante, Petrarch, and Chaucer—we can begin to more fully understand the sentimentalism we, as readers, have when journeying with the Bard. For instance, in describing the love of Romeo and Juliet, Dyck writes, “Petrarchism provides the vocabulary and syntax conveying one’s desire to ascend—but not just the social ladder, the heavenly one too, the ladder of love.” Because Romeo and Juliet juxtapose an implicitly acknowledged metaphysical reality of love to which Romeo and Juliet are trying to ascend though they fail, their love is sanctified by the reality of loving goodness, that they themselves are good, and our own recognition of this metaphysical love as readers. Dyck notes, “if Romeo and Juliet is to be considered a work of theological romance—a play in which romantic love is conceived as motion, as mysterious, and as good—then it must, despite the potential for a response, be able to maintain the primacy of the metaphysical in the material, to assert an integrity that transcends the irony.” This, of course, is precisely what most of us who read Romeo and Juliet experience.

But not all of Shakespeare’s plays acknowledge the reality of metaphysical love. Troilus and Cressida, in contrast to Romeo and Juliet, is a thoroughly tragic romance in its purely materialist cosmos (a cosmos devoid of God). The love of Troilus is still good, touching, and moving even, but his love is directed to a bad object (Cressida). Love itself is good, but the Beloved is not always good. Dyck comments on our need to recognize the brilliance of Shakespeare’s interrogation of love in a loveless cosmos:

It is not simply, though, that Shakespeare raises the Petrarchan objection to Dante’s and Chaucer’s projects, namely, that earthly and heavenly loves do not and ultimately cannot cohere, but rather that he finds one particular challenge to their coherence and makes that the subject of his work. That challenge is the incapacity of the earthly beloved to be ideal, worthy of divine love.

Here we must briefly return to Augustine, though Dyck does not. In De Trinitate, Augustine refined his earlier writings on love which seem to leave behind the earthly beloved for the supernatural Beloved that is God (a common misreading of Augustine). Nearing the final decades of his life, Augustine fused the love of God into the love of the earthly beloved, “This word is conceived in love of either the creature or the creator, that is of the changeable nature or unchangeable truth; which means either in covetousness or in charity. Not that the creature is not to be loved, but if that love is related to the creator it will no longer be covetousness but charity…the lower creature should be used to bring us to God, the creature on a par should be in enjoyed, but in God.” To love God in an earthly beloved is the highest form of love we experience in life.

What Augustine provided in his theology would be fleshed out by the medieval and Renaissance poets: love of a creature, a human creature, as an object of love is sanctifying so long as the earthly and heavenly coexist in the beloved—you love Divine Love in loving the Image of Love in another human. Augustine’s view, though, requires the metaphysical reality of Love as Divinity. Troilus and Cressida is, therefore, a play where Shakespeare interrogates the possibility of human love without Divinity as some late Renaissance writers had begun exploring. The end result is a tragedy—but not one that has a redemptive spirit as in Romeo and Juliet but one that leaves a bad and bitter taste in the mouth of the audience. Shakespeare answers No! to the possibility of human love without God (thus giving the same answer Augustine gave regarding the possibility of sanctifying human life apart from God), and we who intuitively understand the same don’t find the play’s tragic end ultimately, even remotely, sanctifying even if we sympathize with Troilus.

In a world without metaphysical love (God) then all that there is in the world is “power (or force), will, and appetite.” This is why many modern scholars and critics, who themselves disavow the reality of transcendent metaphysical love, have commentated upon the “existentialism” and “modernism” of Troilus and Cressida. When humans are reduced to animals, as the character Thersites implies, then only power, will, and appetite remain. Troilus and Cressida, then, is an Augustinian play set purely in the city of man with no tie to the city of God. In a world without metaphysics, or metaphysical love, there is only force, power, will, and appetite—all leading to death as is the logic of a cosmos with love.

While love can be redeeming, sanctifying, and tragic, love can also cause one to fall into a trance. Twelfth Night, as Dyck interprets it, is about the motion of love in the interior realm of the human person rather than the outward actions it causes. Love touches the imagination, something Shakespeare takes from Augustine, and, as such, Twelfth Night explores “the problem [of love] not with the beloved, with her value or ‘imagined worth,’ but with the imagination itself.”

Looking at how love moves into the mind, “Shakespeare suggests in Twelfth Night that the relish of the unmoored imagination and even the immobility that tends to follow from it are, oxymoronically, and perhaps even paradoxically, an essential part of love’s moment.” The movement of love is interior, it conquers the imagination and brings about “the transfiguration of the mind.” All of us who have been hit by Cupid’s arrow are probably familiar with being struck into immobility by the thunderbolt of love. But Dyck’s overview of this reality isn’t that love isn’t moving, but that love’s movement has taken on a movement of a different kind.

Love’s conquering of the imagination and eventual transfiguration of the mind will lead to embodied action—this is what we see by the end of the drama, especially with Orsino, Olivia, and Viola. Love moves more than the body or the will. Love conquers and moves the mind or imagination. Love touches the totality of the human condition: sight, emotions, imagination, and thought, all leading to eventual action. This combination of love in the interior human leading to sanctified action in exterior (embodied) life procures wonder—the ultimate transfiguration of imaginative love.

Lastly, Dyck looks at Antony and Cleopatra. Although it is a historical and tragic play, Dyck also considers the play a romance. And not just any romance. A romance building on Twelfth Night and the exploration of love and the imagination, “Antony and Cleopatra may also be seen as a continuation of Shakespeare’s exploration of the imagination’s role in love and agency in Twelfth Night.”

The obvious thread of connection between the plays and the love themes of imagination and agency becomes apparent once you realize that the love Antony and Cleopatra share for each other is one they imagine about themselves. Their love causes them “to stand up peerless” compared to others. They put on performative love, their embodied eroticism is an expression of their imaginations about each other. Where Twelfth Night explores love conquering the imagination and leading to action, Antony and Cleopatra explores imagined love that has already erupted on the stage of agency! Antony and Cleopatra are the “peerless” examples of imaginative lovers brought to action, brought to life on a cold and mechanical stage (represented by Octavius and the encroaching Roman Empire), from their first entrance to their final exit. Dyck explains this view succinctly, “Antony and Cleopatra show an awareness of imagination’s potential for moving loving too. Both characterize their beloved and themselves in imaginative terms.” Then we often witness their love which they have fantasized about.

The love of Antony and Cleopatra we find somewhat sanctifying despite the obvious sensualism they indulge in is their fidelity to each other. “Husband, I come,” Cleopatra declares. This faithfulness to each other (yes, a poetic license that Shakespeare conjures given the actual historical evidence, but that is beside the point) is also Augustinian. Part of Augustine’s mature vision of marriage is fidelity between lover and beloved, beloved and lover. This faithfulness to one another is something Antony and Cleopatra exhibit, all things considered. They are only themselves when in each other’s loving arms. Thus, though they die, the audience feels a sense of sanctification between the two lovers despite their admittedly gaudy sensualism. Love’s sanctifying work through fidelity is complete.

What Darren Dyck has accomplished in Will & Love is a remarkable achievement, a work of literary criticism in its finest and noblest form. He has flawlessly provided a concise intellectual summary of the theological and poetic contours that Shakespeare inherited, which shaped his own dramas. Although “Shakespeare is not a theologian,” Dyck restores the theological heart to Shakespeare that has always been there for those with the eyes to see and ears to hear. Let us see and hear Shakespeare anew thanks to this splendid new book.

Will & Love: Shakespeare and the Motion of the Soul
By Darren Dyck
Eugene OR, Cascade Books, 2023; 302pp

Print